FAQ

Q: What is the Environmental Data Exchange?

A: EDX makes environmental datasets available and useful.

EDX is an open service that brings together environmental datasets from a wide variety of sources, and makes them available in one place for easy access by a community of data users. By enabling data sharing, exchange, and collaboration we aim to drive discovery, insight, and innovation across a range of environmental interests, from planning and managing for sustainability, to predicting and understanding extreme weather events and environmental risks and change.

EDX aims to build a community of users who are actively contributing and exploiting the datasets made available from the EDX portal.

Q: Is EDX really “open”?

A: EDX makes environmental datasets available and useful.

Yes, anyone can join the EDX community and contribute datasets, use the available datasets, or both. To join, just sign up at the portal Sign Up page.

EDX includes both open and closed datasets. Any user can access the open datasets in EDX. To access a closed dataset, you first need permission from the data owner. The EDX portal makes it easy to identify a dataset owner and find contact details, but you will need to negotiate access permission yourself.

Q: What technologies does EDX use?

A: EDX makes environmental datasets available and useful.

EDX uses the open source http://ckan.org/ platform to power its data portal, and enable publishing, sharing, finding, and using contributed datasets. The EDX portal is cloud hosted on a UK-based cloud services platform.

NOTE: In the current release, datasets published via EDX are not hosted by EDX but by the dataset provider.

Q: Who else is involved?

A: A number of organisations, companies, and individuals are already involved, including the Environment Agency, World Bank, National Grid, DEFRA, DECC and Oxford Flood Network.

The goal of EDX is encourage an active community of data providers and consumers, in order to seed and accelerate innovative and useful products and services that address the issues and concerns, as well as the opportunities, arising from sustainability and environmental risk and change models.

Q: I’ve got a dataset, how do I contribute it?

A: Any registered user can onboard a dataset.

Datasets are onboarded using a simple form-based onboarding page. The form prompts the user to identity the dataset and enter all the relevant metadata to allow the data-set to be indexed and become searchable.

Q: What services does EDX provide?

A: Portal services include:
Browse, search and use data-sets
• Rating of data-sets
• Access to community tools such as forums
• Ability to publish data-sets

Signed up members can upload new datasets and manage their existing datasets, join the discussion boards and post to them, and use the following community features:
• rate datasets
• user comments
• feature wish list
• dataset wish list

Anyone can browse the portal without logging in and therefore without signing up.

Q: I’ve got a dataset, how do I contribute it?

A: Any registered user can onboard a dataset.

Datasets are onboarded using a simple form-based onboarding page. The form prompts the user to identity the dataset and enter all the relevant metadata to allow the data-set to be indexed and become searchable.

Q: Are there restrictions on how I use datasets from EDX?

A: EDX includes both open and closed datasets. Any user can access the open datasets in EDX. There are no restrictions on how you use them, or on what you build with them. There are no commercial (or anti-commercial) licensing impacts on your products or services when you use EDX open datasets, although it makes your product or service more useful if you identify which datasets you build on.

To access a closed dataset, you first need permission from the data owner. The EDX portal makes it easy to identify a dataset owner and find contact details, but you will need to negotiate access permission, rights, and other details yourself.

Q: Does EDX provide API access to data?

A: API access to data is on the EDX roadmap but is not supported in the current release.

Datasets are onboarded using a simple form-based onboarding page. The form prompts the user to identity the dataset and enter all the relevant metadata to allow the data-set to be indexed and become searchable.

Q: What metadata do I need to provide with my dataset?

A: Every dataset should provide the following metadata, which will be added to the portal to make the dataset discoverable via search: